Since I am suggesting to use The GIMP for your digital scrapbooking for those of you that want to try Digital Scrapbooking but currently do not use any other software, I have been using it myself to create tutorials and to get a feel of the software.

In the past I have been using PhotoShop and Paint Shop Pro to create my elements and my digital scrapbook layouts.

I have to say that I really really like The GIMP. It is really easy to use and it has many functionalities found on Photoshop.

The only thing that I was concern about was the performance, so I did some research on the internet and found the solution !

I originally notice the performance issues when using my full blown 12x12 @300 dpi Photoshop Templates on The GIMP, but after making those changes, I can easily work on those big templates without noticing low performance.

I do think is worth mentioning that even in Photoshop I see performance issues when I work with my full blown 12x12 @ 300dpi Photoshop Templates. [Maybe I need to change Photoshop's Tile cache size as well]

The change above was ALL I needed to do to improve the performance on my computer, but if after making that change, you are still having problems, then try the following:

Another thing to can also affect The GIMP Performance is your computer's own resources and since Digital Scrapbooking is all about image manipulation, the more the better. :-)

If you have a slow or old computer or if your computer continues having performance problems, try to close all other program while creating your layout using The GIMP. Image manipulation takes a lot of your computer resources and if you are doing other tasks at the same time, the computer will have a lot more to do and it will look like if it is doing nothing, while trying to process all of the requested tasks.

You could also try working on a smaller resolution layouts and then resize them once the layouts are finalized. I will submit a tutorial on how to do this later.

To basically summarize what the documentation says in more human terms, is since the GIMP can take up a lot of system resources (and with scrapbooking it does), you can reallocate how you're using your memory.

Memory is how your computer temporarily stores data it's using, and there are two types of memory.... RAM and swap (sometimes called virtual memory). RAM is the dedicated memory of the computer, and swap is a special partition on your hard drive that can be used like RAM when your RAM is maxed out.

By changing the tile cache to something like 256MB, you're basically telling The GIMP that when all the changes you've made are taking up more than 256MB in the memory, please move part of this to my swap partition so I don't run out of memory.

While utilizing the swap memory does boost performance in the sense that you're not going to be running out of memory and possibly losing your layout (I've had problems with crashing personally), however.... it does make your hard drive have to work harder, so if you're going to be doing a ton of scrapping, the most optimal thing to be doing is adding more RAM to your machine.

Thanks, mine crashes occasionally. I upgraded to a pc with more RAM this spring and performance was WAY up. I wish they would add a back-up feature cause it sucks when you loose your work lol

Maybe I'll have to move it down a bit, and see if it crashes less that way.

Well, this is what I can tell about the crashing specifically...

I'm not sure whether The GIMP auto detects how much RAM you have or just has it set automatically to 1024MB (1GB) by default because that's how much most average users have.

The problem is because it's set to the exact amount of RAM a computer probably has, it ends up running out of RAM before it ever gets to the point where the title is big enough to move to the swap partition. RAM is also being used by the operating system, any other programs running, etc so The GIMP can never use 100% of the RAM your computer has. Theoretically, what should happen is an error message saying that you're running out of RAM, please save and shut down the program would appear.... However, after playing with The GIMP for quite a bit recently, I'm convinced that there's a bug with the way they're doing error detection when it comes to memory.

To basically summarize what the documentation says in more human terms, is since the GIMP can take up a lot of system resources (and with scrapbooking it does), you can reallocate how you're using your memory.

Memory is how your computer temporarily stores data it's using, and there are two types of memory.... RAM and swap (sometimes called virtual memory). RAM is the dedicated memory of the computer, and swap is a special partition on your hard drive that can be used like RAM when your RAM is maxed out.

By changing the tile cache to something like 256MB, you're basically telling The GIMP that when all the changes you've made are taking up more than 256MB in the memory, please move part of this to my swap partition so I don't run out of memory.

While utilizing the swap memory does boost performance in the sense that you're not going to be running out of memory and possibly losing your layout (I've had problems with crashing personally), however.... it does make your hard drive have to work harder, so if you're going to be doing a ton of scrapping, the most optimal thing to be doing is adding more RAM to your machine.